CRITICS AND CRITICISM
It is often said of critics that they are people who have failed in making creations of their own, and my own beginning as a critic was due to a failure—a failure to get a suitable job after leaving the university.
V.S. Naipaul (1932–2018), novelist and essayist, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001. Among his earliest books are The Mystic Masseur (1957); The Suffrage of Elvira (1958); Miguel Street (1959); A House for Mr Biswas (1961); and The Mimic Men (1967). His In a Free State (1971) won the Booker Prize and was followed by Guerrillas (1975), A Bend in the River (1979), The Enigma of Arrival (1987), and A Way in the World (1994). Naipaul published several other books, both fiction and non-fiction, including Half a Life (2001), widely considered among his most important. He was knighted in 1989.